Monday, July 23, 2012

HBO's The Newsroom Reflects Aaron Sorkin's Bad Ethics

Time Warner's HBO unit is progressive. This is not surprising because progressivism, the ideology of Bernard Baruch and Warren Buffett, reflects HBO's owner, Time Warner's, interests. Starting in the third episode, creator Aaron Sorkin, who has recently fired next season's writing staff, allows political zealotry to careen out of control. The show's strident ideology eliminates its entertainment value.

The show begins by depicting lead character Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) as a Republican; it then attributes an assortment of left wing ideological positions to him. The only Republicans who share McAvoy's views are New York City's Upper East Side elite, embodied in the city's authoritarian, billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, and its former governor, Nelson Rockefeller. Like the Upper East Side Republicans, McAvoy pretends to care for the poor, all the while pursuing Wall Street's and HBO owner Time Warner's interests.

New York City Republicans, known in Theodore Roosevelt's day as Progressives, in Reagan's day as Rockefeller Republicans, and today as RINOs, tend to be more left wing than Democrats or Republicans who cannot afford to live on Manhattan Island. The show's Progressivism reflects the preferred ideology of the super rich.

Progressivism links to Wall Street and money center banking. In fact, its chief proponent during the second half of the twentieth century was David Rockefeller, the chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank and the wealthiest of the many Rockefeller heirs. (Only one of hundreds of Rockefeller heirs, at 97 David Rockefeller is the 159th richest man in America.) Naturally, Progressives keep the interests of banks and Wall Street uppermost in mind. The media, including Time Warner, have offered monotone support for the multi-trillion dollar bank bailouts of recent years (according to the Jerome Levy Economic Institute, amounting to $29 trillion, more than twice the entire economy). As well, Time Warner has tirelessly supported a two-party system that has yielded rich benefits.

Another of the show's deceptions is its attack on Charles and David Koch. The Kochs have certainly funded libertarian and conservative movements--just as David Rockefeller has supported the Council on Foreign Relations, George Soros has supported Barack Obama, and the Sulzbergers have supported the inheritance tax for everyone but themselves. (The fifth generation of Sulzbergers has inherited The New York Times through a trust free of tax--they would not own The Times otherwise--but The Times advocates a stiff inheritance tax for small businessmen and farmers.)

The Newsroom's Will McAvoy considers George Soros's donations to progressive causes as pure in intent, but the Kochs' donations as purely corrupt. This is deceitful propaganda. I question Sorkin's and HBO's ethics in making claims like this. Much of what the Kochs have done, such as David Koch's candidacy for vice-president in 1980 on the Libertarian Party ticket, has had little to do with personal gain. If the Cato Institute is corrupt, the Brookings Institute, advocate of Wall Street bailouts, is twice as corrupt.

A third deception is the show's peculiar claim that because the Kochs are slightly wealthier than Soros (Soros, with $20 billion, is seventh on the Forbes 400 while the Koch brothers, with $25 billion each, are tied for fourth), their donations reflect special interests, but Soros's don't. The claim that $20 billion is too little for Soros to be motivated to engage in securing political gains through political donations is one of the strangest and most ridiculous claims ever made on television, especially in light of the billions he has received from President Obama via the Ex-Im Bank. Michael Bloomberg, the 14th richest on the Forbes list, secured a third term as mayor by making blanket donations to New York's state legislators. That could not possibly be corrupt because Bloomberg is a Progressive who is busily reinventing slum living in the name of green development.

The show gets the difference between the Kochs' and Soros's wealth wrong. You would think that a show devoted to advocating accuracy in news reporting would gets its own facts right, but the show makes repeated factual errors. I took a minute and looked up the Forbes 400 list. Sorkin is, apparently, too incompetent to do so. On the show Will McAvoy claims that the Kochs can buy Soros ten times over. That is incorrect. Combined the Kochs have 2.5 times Soros's money. I would add that, unlike Soros, the Kochs produce value for consumers in exchange for their wealth. Soros is a financial manipulator who produces nothing of value for anyone but himself, and frequently engages in market manipulation and deceit to make his money. He was convicted in France and indicted in England for financial manipulation. He was also accused of manipulating the Thai bhat and causing great suffering in Thailand in the late 1990s.

Another example of simple factual error is Will McAvoy's etiology of the tea party. The Tea Party was created by Ron Paul. It is a slanderous lie that many of the tea party chapters received funding from the Kochs. I belonged to the Kingston-Rhinebeck Tea Party and am familiar with several others in my area. None has received funding from any outsider. They are funded by the participants. There are thousands of Tea Party chapters around the country. The claim that the Kochs funded more than a few is slanderous. Are Sorkin's, HBO's and Time Warner's Progressive views so lacking in merit that they need to make up wholesale lies about the Tea Party to make any headway?

The 800 pound gorilla, on whose largesse Sorkin's salary depends, is Wall Street; Ron and Rand Paul threaten the endless subsidies that Sorkin's sugar daddies at Time Warner provide him. As a conglomerate Time Warner has depended on and continues to depend on Wall Street and money center banks for its frail existence--and the crony capitalism Progressivism has created. The one special interest that the media will inevitably protect--and The Newsroom is no exception--are the money center banks and Wall Street.

Here is a list of the recipients of Time Warner's political donations. These are the politicians who benefit from Sorkin's Newsroom.

The date of the contribution to Geraldine Ferraro is given on the list. It is 6/24/1998. She died in 2011. The list was simply cut and pasted from the Federal Elections Commissions list. You should be more skeptical of the news media than of that primary data source. It is at www.fec.gov.

I have no idea what goes on in politicians' minds, but I can guarantee that if you contribute $300 to your congressman he will find time to meet with you. I once told the Kingston-Rhinebeck Tea Party that fact, and that I had contributed to a Democrat to influence him, and they started attacking me for contributing to him. What they don't get is (a) there is little difference between the two parties (b) if you contribute to a candidate they will tend to do what you want. A thousand dollars will get you mileage if there are no other contributors.

If they contribute to both sides, both sides tend to remember what they received more than they remember what the other guy received. In general, they give to incumbents, not to challengers. The reason is that incumbents almost never lose, in part because they get almost all the large donations. You would think the public would start voting against incumbents, but that has not occurred. That would require too much.

I'm curious how you reached the conclusion that (a) the contribution to Geraldine Ferraro is the only contribution listed when there are hundreds of names on the list and (b) that Time Warner stopped contributing to candidates in 1998. The fact that one of hundreds of donation recipients died last year seems to be of importance to you, but I'm having trouble understanding its significance. Can you explain that?

Is your point that Time Warner's hundreds of contributions are less important than Charles and David Koch's? If so, what's the difference? Are you sure that Charles and David Koch haven't given to some politicians who have since died?

*sigh* I just decided to do some research on the newsroom and how it is publicly received in the USA - as it obviously really is very close to propaganda - and found a couple of posts like this. I just bothered to write a comment under this one as this seems to be one of the more reasonable ones. What struck me as something between terrifying and stunning is how *every* *single* *post* I read about this fails to understand the point they are making. And while I do not subscribe to the Newsrooms Agenda (even though I'm clearly more an upper east side person than a normal republican, it seems... being super rich somehow doesn't really describe me though), I still think it should be critizized for the things it does, instead of attacking some weird strawman arguments. The episode didn't even complain about public funding in general, it even mentioned the general support of people like Soros. The notion it attacked was the Tea Party existing without this support.That is a difference and the reason why it is pointless to list Time Warner's donations. (Unless, of course, some of those claimed they would work without those... but that would be another issue.)

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Mitchell Langbert

About Me

I have researched and written about employee benefit issues and in my previous life was a corporate benefits administrator. I am currently associate professor of business at Brooklyn College. I hold a Ph.D. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Business, an MBA from UCLA and an AB from Sarah Lawrence College. I am working on a project involving public policy. I blog on academic and political topics.